BIZARRE AS it may seem, Donald Trump and the TV series Adolescence might turn out to be the wake-up call we’ve desperately needed.

Trump is hell-bent on bringing globalisation to its knees; a blessing in itself. But Adolescence offers the starker warning of the techno-feudalism that might follow. It is this alienation from ourselves that brings the biggest challenge. To do so, we need a fundamental rethink of today’s politics and economics.

None of this will stop Trump from reducing the US to a feral, semi-feudal society. It may have been coming anyway. But Trump’s whimsical, on/off, up/down approach to tariffs has left even his most ardent supporters wincing. If the US can no longer be seen as anyone’s reliable ally, the search for a better plan becomes all the more urgent. This is where Adolescence comes in.

The screening of the TV series sparked a wide-ranging debate about alienation. This isn’t because we fear our children will all turn to mindless killing. It is because we know that, in a broader sense, they (and we) are lost; that the bonds between people and planet and purpose are steadily disappearing.

The poor know their lives have been getting poorer and their children’s prospects worse. The once secure “middle” also sees their shops and amenities closing and their children’s career pathways narrowing. Technologies that were meant to save us are now being used to distract us until they replace us.

So it is with our children. The technology distractions they retreat into inform and misinform in equal measure. Adults aren’t much better. People often talk more to Alexa than to their neighbours. The result is a growing sense of isolation and an undermining of social interaction skills.

We meet on Zoom or WhatsApp far more than we meet in person. Young people don’t have to engage in team sports or games. They play on computers instead. In any case, schools have been forced to sell off sports fields, local factory pitches disappeared with the factories and community centres closed in the early rounds of local authority cuts.

Intergenerational links, once central to apprenticeships and localised production, disappeared in the same way. Political obsessions with “productivity,” cheapness and deregulation then chased work elsewhere and wealth into offshore hideouts.

Carl Sagan warned about this in his 1990s book The Demon-Haunted World: “I have a foreboding of a US, in my children’s or grandchildren’s time, when the US is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few; and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.”

He could have been describing today’s anywhere. This is the land embraced by Trump and his tech-bros and exploited by Reform and the far right.

Delusions of progress

Governments around the world fell for the illusion that you can only fund better services by driving up productivity. But productivity gains increasingly looked to replace labour rather than reward it. What this delivered was a diminishing workforce, on more limited wages, in an economy where profits were hoovered off-shore rather than spent on local services.

Amazon is a classic case in point. It makes vast profits, but pays no British taxes. It automates large parts of its distribution processes and rigorously monitors worker productivity. Union recognition is rejected, and long-term job security is anyone’s guess. None of today’s school leavers expect to find a job-for-life at Amazon. “Productivity” gains will replace them with automated processes.

It doesn’t stop with Amazon. Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, claims that “within the next year, the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers.”

Already, 20 per cent of the annual improvements in AI come from computers themselves. Schmidt predicts that within six years, “regenerative self-improvement” by computers will see AI replacing all top-level mathematicians working in the sector.

At that point, there will be an AI Matrix with a mind greater than the sum of all humans. And behind it will be a stranded generation of bright kids, who can talk to computers but not to each other.

If you want to save the kids...

At this point, technology could decouple itself from humanity. Alienation would run riot. We have no idea what would follow. In the meantime, Jeff Bezos will fly his friends to the edge of space while half the planet tries to flee from the edge of war or starvation. This is closer to dystopia than progress.

If ever there was a moment needing “regenerative self-improvement” of humanity, this is it. And if you could ask advice from tomorrow’s AI superbrain, it would probably tell you this — “If you want to save the kids, save the planet. And if you want to know how, just ask Frank.”

Looking for Frank

Finding Frank is the easy part. Following his inauguration as US president in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to end the era of austerity and mass unemployment. His New Deal programme redirected the creation of credit away from speculation and in favour of restoration. The results were spectacular.

In just nine years, Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) planted three billion trees, created 800 new state parks, built 10,000 small reservoirs, 46,000 bridges, established 13,000 miles of hiking trails and re-stocked the nation’s rivers with over one million fish.

In doing so, the CCC created over three million jobs. No less important was that it democratised conservation work and environmental repair. What Roosevelt used to end the Great Depression, we must replicate to avert the Great Alienation.

Today’s young people know far more about the fragility of the world than I ever did at their age. They have a hunger to repair the planet, but are stuck with political leaders still obsessed with consuming it.

Public spending under the New Deal grew at 14 per cent a year, and the US economy flourished.

It makes a mockery of British obsessions with Treasury rules, spending cuts and chasing growth rather than repair and redistribution. Only Ed Miliband seems to grasp the urgency of transformative change. The silver lining is that Trump may force this on us.

Sleepwalking into a nightmare

The world Trump would lead us into is dystopic. He wants governments across the world to bow to the tech-bros who strut his White House corridors and define his economic landscape.

He wants control over the IT universe and social media networks, so as to shape elections and create scapegoats. He would close universities and institutions that question his omniscience. He would roll 1984 and Brave New World into one and call it Truth Social.

The leaders who follow — a mixture of the bribed, the bamboozled and the brain-dead — will race down deregulatory pathways, transferring wealth and power away from sustainable democracies. It is what the new kings of the ether demand. Their race into AI domination is at the centre of this.

Already, human needs come a poor second. Every new data centre requires the same amount of energy as needed to heat 220,000 homes. One has become a symbol of growth, the other the unaffordability of need.

None of today’s concentrations of wealth and power counter the breakdown of international institutions, nor the unchecked acts of international slaughter. None challenge our unpreparedness for climate breakdown.

This is why a leap into Green New Deal alternatives is fast becoming a species-saving imperative.

Replacing humanity

In his book Homo Deus, Noah Yuval Harari warned that, in the world of today’s super-rich, “equality is out — immortality is in.” The AI advances the rich pursue would allow them to cross not only the frontiers of space, but of life and death itself.

If tech-bros get their way, and an AI aristocracy outflanks democracy and equality, then humanity itself will become a disposable part of the political spectrum. No wonder the kids are troubled.

We still have time (just) to avoid this mess. MPs could make technology accountable to democracy. Bold government funding for a Green New Deal could turn adolescence into a gateway to social inclusion and transformation. A million new jobs would do for starters.

Delivering it isn’t that difficult. If MPs want to create a future that counters alienation, they can ignore Alexa. Just go and ask Frank. Roosevelt still offers the best way of repairing fences — and ourselves.

Alan Simpson is a former Labour member of Parliament (1992-2010) for Nottingham South.